Blowing hot and cold: a serious lesson on Finnish sauna etiquette

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They say some like it hot. But in Finland everyone likes it hot. And then they like it cold. And then hot again. It’s a national obsession. According to the Finnish Sauna Society, there are now up to three million saunas in Finland, which sounds like a lot even before you discover that there are only 5.5 million Finns available to sit in them. That’s one sauna for every 1.8 people.

If hot is your thing, well, a sauna is the ideal place to toy with the upper limits of what humans can tolerate. Between 80C and 90C ought to do it. And cold? After about 15 minutes of chucking water on sizzling coals, you’ll be pretty steamed up, so take a cooling shower – or if you’re doing it properly, go for a dip in a freezing lake. Then repeat, this time while whisking yourself gently with a birch twig. (It helps circulation, apparently.)

The aesthetics of Finnish saunas are unmistakable

In Britain the idea of a “sauna day”, when private saunas open their doors to the public, would be cause for mild amusement – coloured, no doubt, by the rather grubby connection on our shores between saunas and “massage parlours”. In Helsinki, which had its first such celebration earlier this year, saunas are such a source of pride that tomoorrow they are doing Helsinki Sauna Day all over again.

The Finnish Sauna Society sums it all up in the words of the Finnish writer Maila Talvio: “There is nothing that Finns have been so unanimous about as their sauna. This unanimity has remained unbroken for centuries and is sure to continue as long as there are children born in their native land, as long as the invitation still comes from the porch threshold in the evening twilight: 'The sauna is ready.’ ”

Swimming costumes are frowned upon because they are reputed to give off poisonous chlorine fumes in extreme heat; sporting a towel is just seen as a bit weird, or foreign

The newest sauna to be ready is called Loyly, named after the Finnish word for sauna steam. An intriguing wooden structure sculpted to resemble a Scandi-chic mountain range, it opened this summer on the city’s shoreline and has a range of steam-based options for people to enjoy. Meanwhile, the new Allas Sea Pool – yes, that means you’re swimming in the Baltic – also offers a trio of saunas, along with a heated freshwater pool. But saunas are far more likely to be private affairs. They are places for families to catch up in, for business people to talk shop and – back in March, at the inaugural Helsinki Sauna Day – for me to worry about how much clothing I was supposed to be wearing.

Along with a group of relative strangers, I’d fetched up at Katajanokan Kasino – a solid-looking building built in 1913 for the army to use as a banqueting hall. Bypassing the restaurant, we were ushered downstairs to a zone of slightly scuffed white tiles and wooden benches, all with a friendly aura of municipal dilapidation. The Katajanokan Kasino’s sauna is not usually open to visitors. However, it being Sauna Day, they had gone for the Full Monty, as it were. There would even be a traditional round of sausages and beer afterwards.

To be honest, I didn’t really want to think about sausages at that point. In Finland’s public saunas, men and women have separate areas, or keep to different hours, but nakedness is the norm. Swimming costumes are frowned upon because they are reputed to give off poisonous chlorine fumes in extreme heat; sporting a towel is just seen as a bit weird, or foreign. Eventually – inevitably? – I decided I was happy to be both those things. Modesty preserved, for the next half hour I surveyed a view of the Baltic from my wood-lined haven, while gradually turning an uncomfortable shade of lobster.

How the Fins move from sauna to sauna

If you can’t stand the heat, of course, it’s wise to get out of the sauna. And if you want to experience the opposite extreme of temperature then you should travel over 600 miles north of Helsinki, to Finnish Lapland.

“It can get really chilly here,” I was told on arrival by Mikael Rissanen, a local guide. This is the sort of Nordic understatement you hear quite a lot of when you’re 150 miles above the Arctic Circle. At its most “chilly”, Saariselka, the nation’s most northerly ski resort, can experience temperatures as low as -45C. Winter lasts 200 days, from November to May. It’s chilly in the same way that hurricanes are breezy and the Alps are quite tall.

By early March – well after kaamos, the month-long Arctic night, is over – the snow sticks around in Saariselka, frozen solid in clumps on the trees, whipped by the wind into strange, doughy shrouds. With the temperature still well below zero, I’d been dressed in exactly the opposite of sauna attire: a winter onesie, with big gloves and boots. The onesie, Mikael told me, was designed not only to shield me from the cold, but also to protect my clothes from snowmobile petrol fumes. And to fend off husky pooh, he added.

In the absence of mountains, you have to work that little bit harder to get the most from your winter environment. Saariselka – its neat little centre surrounded by mokki, log cabins used as holiday homes – is famed for cross-country skiing, rather than the gravity-assisted Alpine variety. Mikael, understated again, said he had no particular skill at it, then contradicted himself by showing me how to get to grips with the narrow skis, and the swing and glide of my arms and legs. I did my best, but clearly wasn’t learning quickly enough for his liking, so we visited those freely defecating huskies instead.

We took snowmobiles northwards over the fells, passing road signs buried up to their necks in snow, skimming over lakes frozen solid and along forest trails that glittered under the low Arctic sun. Had we veered right for 20 miles or so, we’d have hit the Russian border, but Mikael said that Finns do their best to ignore Russia, so we pressed on. Snowmobiles are easy to drive: just twist the throttle and hold tight. It means you can concentrate on your surroundings and appreciate the otherworldly stillness when you finally cut the engine to take a photo.

Not that there was any otherworldly stillness at the Alba kennels, on the shore of (frozen) Lake Kuukkelilampi. Here Alister Dunlop, a Scot, keeps 100 or so frantically yapping Alaskan huskies, ready to race or ferry tourists around the place. Alister was big on the relationship between man and dog. “Don’t ever try to be the big man,” he said. “They won’t trust you.”

Juha’s sweatbox had an adjacent door through which one could run out into a snowdrift

It turned out that mushing huskies is simpler than snowmobiling, at least at amateur level. You don’t even need to twist a throttle. The dogs really do have a habit of relieving themselves on the move, however, so make sure you have zipped up your onesie.

I tried other winter distractions. Drilling a hole in the middle of a frozen lake seems a daft idea on the face of it, but ice fishing is a popular pastime. I felt that, in a country called Finland, they should surely be able to guarantee fish – but half an hour crouched on a tiny stool dangling a plastic worm into a six-inch hole yielded nothing more than frozen toes.

Back in Saariselka, I warmed up in the Kammi restaurant, a log tepee that served up reindeer meat (smoked, salted or air-dried) while a local Sami “joiked” to the assembled diners – a singing style that welds chant to yodel in strange non-verbal sagas of love lost and reindeers herded.

So far, so peculiar. Throw into the mix the Saariselka’s toboggan run, reputed to be the longest in Europe, an Angry Birds-themed activity park, and a Santa Claus industry that sees families descending on the town in their thousands during the festive season, and Moomins – the elf/troll beasts invented by Finnish literary hero Tove Jansson – start looking like an eminently reasonable idea.

Accommodation does not get much more serenely beautiful

For a sense of calm and order, then, it was good to be staying at Javri Lodge, whose owner, Juha Mehtajarvi, was a man of few words. “It’s quiet here,” he told me. “It’s cold and it’s snowy and it’s… quiet.” Javri was once a mokki for the president of Finland, who hosted world leaders here during the Cold War, which seemed rather apt. Juha claimed to have bought Javri almost by mistake, having previously owned a restaurant in the town, and revealed disarmingly that “none of us know anything about running a hotel”.

He was giving it a good old try, though. The 10 rooms were cute little boxes of wood-lined warmth, scattered with reindeer pelts, their windows lit by the bright white snowscape outside. The open-plan sitting room was strewn with designer furniture and presided over by a moose head, and dinner was taken around a communal table. Juha was proudest of his food, which was exquisite, drawing heavily on local produce, including more reindeer-based delicacies. The swimming pool, housed in its own wooden wing, was a serene treat. And then, of course, there was the sauna.

Before you could say sausage, I was back in my towel. Juha’s glass-and-wood sweatbox had an added twist: an adjacent door through which one could run out into a snowdrift when the inferno within became too much to bear. I tried it twice, my skin burning with dry heat, then wet cold as I wallowed about in his icy natural bath.

By now I’d learnt some sauna vocabulary: there’s was the kiuas, or sauna stove; the loylykauha, a ladle for throwing water; and the kiulu, or water bucket. I’d even got my tongue around kiuaskivet, the name for all those hot stones. But, I asked, what do the Finns call this rolling around in the snow thing? Fundamental to the Finnish psyche the sauna may be, but it seems that some things simply can’t be mystified.

“There isn’t a specific saying for running to the snow from a sauna,” I was told. “We mostly just call it rolling in the snow.”

Javri Lodge in Saariselka offers a four-day full-board package with activities including cross-country skiing and a snowshoe tour, from €1,900 per person based on two sharing (00358 40 502 0409; javri.fi). For a full review and to book, see telegraph.co.uk/tt-javri.